In theology, we make two important distinctions between gods and idols. Idols are almost always more seductive ("seduction" means "to lead astray"). But idols -- fake gods -- cannot lead us toward a more full, integrated and authentic life. We know this is true about exalting money, power, sex or drugs as the gods that rule our lives. Now unrestricted breeding and overpopulation have joined the other anti-life forces. The wages of these reproductive sins that exalt quantity of life over quality of life are the death of many possibilities for the mother and the children who are brought into a home and a world that cannot and will not care for them.
Would you like to see what it looks like when human beings live only like animals, driven only by surviving and breeding? Go to Mexico City, Chicago, Detroit, New York City, or dozens more big cities, all over the world. Picture the ghettos, slums, and shantytowns of the world, and you will see the evil conditions, and the results of those evil conditions.
Do you want to see it up close, one-on-one? Look at pregnant teen-age girls, trapped in a system from which neither they nor their children are likely to escape. Nor are there many kinds of employment open to most of these women. Often lacking even high-school educations, what are they to do? They can be prostitutes and their boyfriends can be pimps, drug pushers and drug takers. Or they can be exploited laborers living at the edge of starvation and kept there by a system that can demand from them what it chooses and give them no more than it must.
It is perhaps the first time in history that those who want to defend their position as religious must begin to recognize that both birth control and abortion are not only an economic necessity today, but also a religious one. People cannot live like human beings in the squalor of the slums and shantytowns in which they will forever be defined, like brutes, by the basic animal instincts of self-preservation and breeding - and, of course, sexual and economic exploitation.
The world doesn't need more people; it's already overcrowded. We will reach a global population of seven billion any day now. Reproduction is not a high calling: anything that lives can breed. The higher calling is asking whether we can be proper stewards of the life we already have. If we can't, it is wrong to let our higher possibilities be smothered by the fertile effects of forceful, sometimes forcible, mating calls. We are meant for more than that, and are urged - commanded - not to settle for less.
This demands widespread sex education: God didn't give us brains just to fill up our skulls. In a pro-life world of the highest order, condoms should be as plentiful as teen-age hormones, if we are to prevent our lowest capacities from putting all higher aspirations out of our reach. "Just say No" doesn't work any better for sex than it does for war. The more we understand about ourselves, the possibilities for our lives, and the costs and potential rewards of becoming a parent, the more likely we are to choose a path that is both beneficial to us, and worthy of God.
And when sex education doesn't exist, when birth control fails, and the only hope left for a woman, a family, a ghetto, a city, a nation or a world is an abortion; when an abortion is the only means left of removing evil conditions which threaten to return this human or these humans to the level of mere brutes, then the church, the state, and all who really honor the possibilities of life must not only condone abortions, but help women get them, safely and easily. God demands it.
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